An easier way in my opinion is to select areas that will be painted the same and then apply Atlas mapping coordinates. Then Unweld them and move them around in the UV viewport and fit them together like a puzzle. This works best for optimized, lower poly meshes. Assign everything to the same map, but use different layers for each area to make it easier to work. Then combine it all in the end. You have one map and everthing unwrapped. Meni's way, if I can remember correctly, requires you to actually deform geometry, but this way only requires you to move polies and verts in the UV viewport...

You need to first decide how you want it broken up. Take a box for example. Obviously we just want the faces to all be unwraped and face the front.
So we moke our box - and then make a new endomorph (bottom right - M - New).
Now comes the unweldingof the relevant points. you can actually unweld them all if you like and then rotate the polys to face the one side - but thats obviously not worth while . So you just unweld some and rotate. Now you assign a texture map to the box (planar map).

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